Labour market flexibility in Australia: Enhancing management prerogative?

Abstract

This article surveys the emergence of arguments about the increasing significance of labour market flexibility in Australia. It develops a critique, which suggests that the call for greater labour market flexibility is most appropriately understood as a call for enhancing management prerogative. It further suggests that efforts to use the concept of labour market flexibility in a more substantive way to describe or analyse social processes within individual enterprises have proved to be failures. The article concludes by arguing that labour-oriented researchers and activists would be best advised both to break with the ideology of labour market flexibility and to renounce the forlorn attempts to use ‘labour flexibility’ as a descriptive and analytical tool. This can create the space for better research into the important issues currently obscured in the literature of labour market flexibility, e.g. investigation of the varied forms and effects of management labour strategies and practices currently taking effect in workplaces throughout Australia.